


Listen! The Bells Ring

by natcat5



Series: After the War [2]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: AU, AkuRoku Day 2013, AkuRoku Month, F/M, Kinda, M/M, Polyamory, Swearing, mild descriptions of past violence, sea salt trio day, still that weird au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 13:21:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natcat5/pseuds/natcat5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is over. <br/>So hold tight to the people you almost lost, and relish in the future that has opened up for you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Listen! The Bells Ring

You wake to the smell of fire and water.

Fire beside you, with an arm curled lazily around your waist, bare chest pressed to yours, with the sweat between the two of you causing your skin to stick. Your head is resting just below his, and you can feel his breath stirring the strands of your hair, smell the lingering scent of tobacco and nicotine. His entire body smells like smoke and charcoal, as usual, and you inhale deeply, breathing him in and leaning your body in towards his.

Then, on the other side of you, is water. Her head resting on your chest, body curled up in a ball and overlapping with yours. Her hair spread out like a fan on top of you, some of it tickling your neck and chin. You feel her heart beat in time with yours, a consistent rhythm that the two of you share, and smell sea salt and sand as she shifts and her head butts up against yours.

The twin scents of fire and water are comforting, familiar, and you’re now too aware and too awake to fall back asleep. So you don’t make a move to get up, staying cushioned comfortably between your two lovers.

It’s still a wonder to you, this feeling of waking up with two other people close beside you. This feeling of waking up with a certainty that you’ll live through the day. That neither you, nor your loved ones will lose their lives attempting to serve the whims of a madman. That the monsters you fought, and the monsters that you commanded, will not rise up through the cobblestone streets to attack and wreak havoc once more.

There are no more Dusks, or Heartless, or Unversed. There are no more megalomaniacs with the power of the universe at their fingertips. No more false gods. No more warped Darkness to twist around and eat at you. To nip at your soul and curl around your toes, while whispering lies into your ears. It’s all done now.

Only this remains. A lazy certainty of a future full of mornings like this. Waking up with Axel on one side and Xion on the other. Of mornings wrapped up tight by fire and water, with each of you twined about one another, making damn sure that none of you will disappear ever again.

You lift one hand towards the chest on your right, tracing your fingers along pinkish scars. Some are because of him protecting you, others because you couldn’t protect him. And one large scar across his side, you can remember causing yourself. Remember Oblivion biting into his side, seeing the blood stain his black coat, and the feeling of cold that spread within you.

You withdraw your hand with a shudder, and drop it so that your fingers fist into the sheets, fighting back the guilt, the regret, and the pain from past actions. From those past decisions that still haunt and shadow your mind. Because it really doesn’t matter if things turned out all right in the end. The fact that you hurt so many of the people that you deeply cared about sits heavy on your soul, and the pain, just like those scars crisscrossing Axel’s chest, will never truly fade.

A hand reaches across your chest to take yours, and you turn your head to see the glassy blue of Xion’s eyes staring up at you. Created as she was from your essence and memories, she is deeply in tune with you and your feelings, a connection that was only deepened by the two of you becoming lovers. You can’t hide anything from her.

She sits up in bed beside you, the hand that was holding yours now resting on your chest, as she blinks sleep out of her eyes. You suck in a breath as her vision clears and her eyes become searching, prying, determined to find an answer to whatever problem you’re wrestling with mentally. Whatever problem has your tumultuous feelings crashing into her.

“Just dwelling on past mistakes,” you say quietly, not wanting to wake up the third point of your fucked up triangle, “Nothing new.”

Xion’s eyes flash with both pain and understanding, and she sighs heavily, brushing her now long black hair behind her ears before leaning down to give you a kiss, holding both sides of your face.

“Roxas, leave the past in the past,” she whispers as she pulls back, a pleading note to her voice, “We promised each other that we would look only towards the future. To be our own people. So don’t waste this life we’ve been given by dwelling on the past. Roxas, the war is over.”

You close your eyes, feeling her breath warm on your face, and lifting one hand to cup the side of her face, before pulling your fingers through the tangled mess of her hair. Beside you, you can hear Axel stirring, feel that massive mound of heat beginning to move, and you breathe in deeply, allowing yourself to relish in this new life, this new present that you’ve found yourself in.

“Yeah,” you agree hoarsely, nodding your head, “Yeah.”

//

When you were ten years old, some asshole seduced your older brother Ventus and a bunch of other idiots into travelling to some far off land in order to fight a war that none of you had ever heard of. Now you know that it was a war spanning across universes. A fight for the Heart of multiple worlds and to stop the Darkness from overwhelming the Light, completely obliterating the balance between the two. You know that now, but even so, you can’t quite shake that lingering resentment you hold towards General Eraqus.

Because if he hadn’t come for your brother, none of that horrible shit would have happened to you. To you, or to Ventus, or even to Sora. Xehanort would never have found any of you if Ventus hadn’t been taken off world, you’re pretty damn sure of that. Working for his fucked up clone has made you privy to some information, and that includes the knowledge that Xemnas really knew jackshit. That all of his info came from warped and badly translated copies of Ansem’s research. He never would have found your family out if Eraqus hadn’t dangled Ventus right in front of his damned nose.  

And because of that, Ventus was killed. Murdered. Tortured to death by the vicious experiments that Xehanort performed upon him. His death was stupid and meaningless, despite all the promises that Eraqus had told your family. That Ventus was going to be a part of a great cause. That he was going to save millions. He never told you that Ventus would die in a horrific experiment gone wrong caused by a man that Eraqus once called colleague.

But that’s what happened. And then fucking Xehanort didn’t even have the decency to die when that same experiment nearly took out his entire lab. No. He had to go and possess your brother’s best friend, and pretend to be Ansem himself. And then, a year later, have his clone go after you and your brother, with the new goal of keeping you alive to be used as weapons for his cause.

Your brother was rescued by a bipedal dog with a speech impediment and a duck in severe need of anger management. You weren’t so lucky.

But you guess what’s important is that you got out, and that the ‘good’ guys won in the end. That you were able to see the corruption of the Organization, and that the years you spent there didn’t fuck you up too much to be able to see that what was happening was wrong. That you met Xion, and learned the truth about what the keyblades were really for, and cast aside the lies that Xemnas had been spewing at you. And even though you left Axel, and fought Axel, you _came back_ to Axel. Or, rather, he came back to you.

And now, here you are, nineteen years old and living in Twilight Town, of all places, with the man whose love you feel deep in your soul and the girl who changed your world. Your twin brother, who fell ass backward into the role of hero of the multiverse, is back on your homeworld of Destiny Islands, with the man and woman he’s been pretty much betrothed to since birth.

As for you? You’re more than a little messed up, and so are your lovers. But you’re all alive, and you don’t have to fight anymore. Xehanort and all his creepy iterations are defeated, and the worlds are safe.

The war is over. 

**Author's Note:**

> I had intended for this to be longer, but I sort of lost momentum for it. ;^_^ Much apologies!


End file.
